Here’s the kind of Donald Trump lie that used to make the public gasp.

"We're cutting $1.7 trillion in this bill and you're not gonna feel any of it. Your Medicaid is left alone. It's left the same."

Republican leaders have been lying about this bill as promiscuously as they lie about everything, claiming among other things that it’ll lower deficits, when it will increase them by trillions; pretending that the 20-or-so million people who will lose their Medicaid and private insurance are all moochers and fraudsters who were never meant to be on the rolls in the first place.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune recently complained that Democrats have had success “demagoguing” the bill, but the truth is the reverse. The Republican sales job is laden with deception, while opponents of the bill have been scrupulous, arguably to a fault, certainly by comparison to Republicans and their lies about Obamacare and its supposed death panels.

But Trump’s latest takes the deception to a new level. It’s as contemptuous a lie as you’ll encounter in politics, aimed directly at his own voters, because he likely won’t come clean even if the bill passes. He’ll carry the lie forward, and seek to discredit his critics, because, as written, the Medicaid cuts he’s lying about will not take effect until after next year’s midterm elections. For the day and week and month and year after the bill passes, most Medicaid beneficiaries won’t be displaced. Many of them won’t know what’s coming.

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Then millions will lose their insurance en masse. Fifteen years ago, as Congress debated the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama told skeptical Americans, “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” He meant to assure people with job-based health plans or Medicaid or Medicare or VA care that Obamacare wouldn’t upend their health-insurance systems. Years later, as insurers cycled individual-market health plans off the market, and a relatively small number of Americans, newly eligible for ACA coverage, received cancelation notices, Republicans pretended to be outraged. They pretended to believe Obama had lied to the public on purpose. Mainstream journalists treated it as a scandal, though it was nothing of the sort.

“Your Medicaid is left alone,” by contrast, is exactly the sort of lie Republicans wanted people to believe Obama had told, and yet it’s crickets from the press.

Here is the manifest failure of a political media and partisan opposition that have become desensitized to Trump’s Orwellian deceptions. It has allowed Trump to neutralize his unrivaled dishonesty and corruption, as if they were ordinary gutter politics. Eight years ago, these were beats unto themselves. His lies would draw attention both to the issues he was lying about and to the inherent depravity of such flagrant deceit.

Today they elicit barely a whisper. Any controversy around this abhorrent bill arises when other Republicans accidentally or privately let on that they know the truth, as when Mitch McConnell told his colleagues that Americans who lose their Medicaid will “get over it,” and Joni Ernst shrugged off the harm they will suffer: “we’re all going to die.”

It should not be this way. We are in a very real sense living through this second, existential Trump presidency because elites became desensitized to his lies. The same blindspot now threatens to help him overcome rightful mass suspicion of his legislative agenda.

2025 HINDSIGHT

What your experiencing as you read this is the demoralizing deja vu of the gaslit.

Over the first half of 2024, Democrats got word to voters about Project 2025. It was a viral messaging success. Project 2025 became the kind of secrecy-cloaked initiative that triggered a defensive response from people who don’t normally think or talk about politics.

Project 2025 polled poorly, voters said it made them less likely to vote for Trump. It was a big part of why Trump was losing the election to Kamala Harris in the summer.

So he lied. He pretended to disavow Project 2025, though it was written by his loyalists. Credulous reporters carried his water. Fact checkers dinged Harris and her supporters when they called it Trump’s agenda. New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman asserted, “It’s not actually a Trump effort.” Democrats retrained their focus. Then, Trump won, and set about imposing an agenda that was even more slashing and lawless than Project 2025.

We are maybe three months past the most convulsive phase of that. We are just a couple weeks past Elon Musk’s messy departure from the administration. We can’t have forgotten how that all came about. We can’t be blind to the bearing it has on Trump’s faithless effort to get his tax and health care cuts enacted.

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CREEPING DOGS LIE

It isn’t quite fair to say Democrats have failed to alert Americans to the looming health-care cuts, or to how all the money will flow into rich people’s pockets. They would prefer to talk about nothing else, and often bring it up unprompted. Trump’s bill polls terribly.

But the information flowing outward to the public lacks the memetic quality that so alarmed voters about Project 2025.

That’s in part because Republicans were wise enough not to name their legislative agenda as if it were a doomsday plot.

But the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act has real “what are they hiding”-style vulnerabilities. There’s been almost no public airing of the legislation in hearing rooms or press events or official analyses. Orders of magnitude less than the ACA.